For the past 80 years, dental students have used artificial (“Dentoform”) teeth and jaws, along with real dental instruments, to develop expertise in cavity preparation and other procedures. There are at least the following shortcomings with this approach:                1. These Dentoform models lack the level of detail and material properties needed to exactly mirror real life teeth and procedures.        2. These Dentoform models do not allow the student's work to be quantified or graded accurately, hence standards are difficult to instill or maintain.        3. Real life experiences such as bleeding or tooth extraction cannot be simulated with Dentoform training models.Due to these and other deficiencies, current training procedures require that dental students gain a portion of their required experience while practicing on patients. This is obviously less than optimal.        
Computer simulation has promised to make medical education, including dentistry, quantifiable and scientific, and to make it possible for students to master procedures without the use of cadavers or the need to practice on live patients. However, computer simulation has not been effective for many types of medical training, including dentistry, because of the lack of true touch interaction. Utilizing classical, visual-only, computer simulations are not acceptable because a significant part of a dentist's learning is sensorimotor in nature. A dentist strongly depends on touch feedback from the tool tip for diagnosis and positional guidance during procedures.
Haptically enhanced simulations can provide the sensorimotor involvement needed for dental training. Moreover, if the simulation can provide a level of haptic realism equal to or better than the artificial-tooth-and-jaw-approach, it promises to be superior to the current physical Dentoform approach in simulating other aspects of procedures such as bleeding. In addition, virtual reality (VR) simulation offers “super-reality” training benefits that are not possible with either Dentoform models or live patients. For example, the student can repeat and playback procedures many times, precisely measure and quantify their results and even zoom in or work in x-ray mode to see their work in detail.